Links for Friday, August 18
Climate links for your educational pleasure, plus a musical treat
This will be a climate-themed post, extending the idea I kicked off here:
A New Climate Frontier
We anticipate acceleration of the long-term global warming rate by at least 50%, i.e., to at least 0.27°C/decade. —James Hansen, “Oh-Oh. Now What?” Did I say overlords? I meant protectors. —Jonathan Coulton, here
But stick around. There’s fun stuff at the end of this piece. Enjoy.
Links
Seven links for today, and a musical treat.
• Why we should expect Global Warming to Skyrocket during next 1.5 years (Paul Beckwith)
We are only getting a taste this summer of what’s to come in the next year or two.
This video is related to a recent James Hansen publication, a letter to his mailing list. (See “A New Climate Frontier” for my discussion.)
The video below explains why next year will be far worse than this one, as bad as this one is, by explaining one chart in the Hansen paper. The video is queued to the relevant explanation. The chart it discusses appears at the top of this page.
In short, the 1997-1998 El Niño peaked at +0.8°C in the first year (left chart above). In the second year, it peaked at +1.2°C (right chart above), for a difference of +0.4°C. Similarly, the 2015-2016 El Niño peaked at +1.2°C in the first year, and at more than +1.6°C in the second year, for a difference of +0.4°C or more.
That strongly implies that this year’s El Niño, which has peaked at +1.5°C, will reach +1.9-2.0°C next year. Thus Hansen’s statement:
[T]he 12-month mean global temperature likely will pierce the 1.5°C warming level before this time next year.
In other words, persistent +1.5°C warming is less than a year away. If he’s wrong, we’ll know soon enough. And if he’s right — well, no one in either party will act like it matters, though pretending to act will be all the rage. After all, you can’t get elected if you don’t know who pays the bills.
File under “The devil you know.”